Apple has given the nod to an application that allows iPhone and iPad users to express solidarity.
Following a personal email to Tim Cook, a mobile app for the expression of solidarity through Je Suis Charlie with Paris has now received official approval to be added to the App Store for iPhone and iPad users.
Nice-Matin, a French news agency, sent Tim Cook a personal email in order to ask for the application’s approval.
Typically, the approval process for including a mobile app into Apple’s store takes around ten to fifteen days. However, one of Tim Cook’s assistants received the email and gave a reply within 10 minutes. The Je Suis Charlie app is now live on the App Store to be downloaded by mobile device users who want to show Paris that they are standing with them.
The mobile app is a unique one which is meant to show the city that the world supports them.
Those who have downloaded the app can add their location to a map, which will show Paris that they are not alone in the world in supporting the Je Suis Charlie campaign, but that many people in places around the globe are standing with them. The app is based on the campaign that went viral on the internet very shortly after the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s office was attacked, killing 12 people.
By the time of the writing of this article, there were well over 110,000 location shares reported through the app. At the start, the majority of the locations that were posted were based in France, but it has been rapidly spreading outward through countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Italy, as well as the United States and Canada.
Apple has been openly sympathetic to the city since the attack, having posted a black Je Suis Charlie banner on its Apple.fr homepage shortly after the campaign started running.
The mobile app is only one of many places that are allowing people to show support. The Je Suis Charlie Twitter hashtag, alone, made its way into almost 3 and a half million tweets within the first 24 hours following the attack.